Mythbusters: 10 Social Media Myths Busted

Brace yourselves. We’re about to alter your mindset on what running a social media account is all about.

Are you strapped in? Good. Let’s get started.

1 . More Impressions are a Good Thing!

No, no they are not. Sure you’re getting more people to see your page, but they may not care at all because of how you’re targeting them.

If you run an account for weddings and you target men and women of all ages, you’re going to get more impressions but you’re also going to dilute your click-through rate. Basically, you’re wasting money on targeting people who never had an interest in your product in the first place.

Focus your targeting on who is most likely to buy your product, therefore your results look better and your engagement is higher

2. If I’m Getting Likes, My Page is Doing Great!

With all of the insights and reporting material we have at our disposal, surface stats like post likes are hardly a reliable gauge as to how your page is performing.

For example, one of the pages we run received hundreds of likes on the regular, but when I did a deeper dive, I noticed that the link clicks were low in comparison. Because I looked further into the issue, I adjusted my content strategy, and posts are now receiving far more link clicks.

Had I just looked at the surface stats, I would have assumed my posts were performing well above my expectations. Those numbers may be appealing for outsiders, but, as the insider, you need to see if there’s more to it.

3. I Can Engage with Commenters with Automated Messages

I’ve been seeing this more often and I don’t like it.

People want to talk to a human when they’re dealing with customer service. If they want the same “We apologize for the inconvenience” message, then they’d call the company itself and deal with pushing buttons and waiting just to talk to someone.

Social media is meant to eliminate the disconnect between the customer and the brand. If somebody is writing the posts and setting the targeting criteria, then surely there is somebody who can also moderate comments.

This is your opportunity to establish a stronger relationship with your fanbase and institute greater loyalty to your brand. Don’t waste it by being another extension of an already disconnected customer service.

4. I Don’t Have to Invest that Much Money in My Posts

This isn’t the early days of social media where a small investment (or even no investment at all) will vault your page to a dizzying reach. With so many companies now throwing their hat into the ring and allocating more money to social media, the competition has become too great for small and medium-sized businesses.

Fortunately, it still doesn’t take that much money–Usually around $5–to get a reach over 1,000 people.

However, it will be interesting to see how this changes over time as social media becomes more and more of a ground for advertising campaign efforts from the world’s most powerful businesses.

5. Buying Fans/Followers Will Make My Page Look Better!

This is related to the second point where we busted the myth that it’s better to have more impressions. While showing off to potential new fans that you already have a solid foundation of fans, it’s going to look suspicious when your page with 25,000 Likes is only getting 4 engagements on every post.

And why would you sow distrust before your new fans even have the chance to get to know you? If you’re misleading and feigning positive results through your social media page, it’s more than likely that your potential customers would believe the same of your business practices.

It’s easy to get exposed too, especially with Facebook cracking down on pages guilty of buying fake fans, as well as the literal sweatshops that create all of these fake pages.

Rather than spending, and essentially wasting, your money on fake fans, why not invest that money in a marketing agency that would build organic growth through legal, reputable means?

6. I Don’t Have to Immediately Respond to my Fans

Thanks to the advent of social media advertising, the gulf between buyer and seller has never been smaller. This development has essentially made it impossible to exonerate a brand from answering its customers, because of the consequences of a comment going unanswered.

There’s nothing preventing a disgruntled customer from going on your official page and leaving a nasty comment about the service or product you provided not living up to their expectations. This is a pivotal point in the buyer-seller relationship, because you can either a) address the comment and attempt to resolve it, or b) ignore and hope it goes away.

And maybe they will go away. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll keep posting about your lack of concern. Maybe they’ll start commenting on every post you make, putting it out there for everyone to see. Maybe other people will see it and they’ll have a poor impression of how you treat your customers.

Maybe they’ll share it to their personal Facebook for their friends and family to see. Maybe the complaint you refused to comment on was so bad that it goes viral and gets shared hundreds of times. Maybe it eventually ends up in the hands of a news network that condemns your business as a company that doesn’t care about its customers for thousands to see.

All because you couldn’t even bother to respond to that person’s complaint.

Outrage culture has led to many people looking at themselves as crusaders of justice. One wrong move against a person who’s that incensed could mean the closing of your doors for good.

So in the future, just answer your customers. Even if they’re not satisfied with your response, the fact that you tried can at least show that you care.

7. The Type of Posts I Make Don’t Matter

I can attest to this from personal experience.

An account we ran here was generating a heavy amount of surface engagement, in terms of reactions, likes and shares, but when we went to look at the amount of clicks it received, they were virtually nonexistent. Clearly, our message wasn’t getting across as we intended.

Making the posts so well that hundreds of people would like and comment on them was encouraging, but what was the point if we weren’t converting? All we had to show for our efforts were some nice social media numbers.

So we decided to switch up the type of posts we make. Rather than just making posts that featured copy leading to a link and an image, we made posts that would have copy, a headline, and a description.

Although this limited what type of image we could use, there was a clearer direction in what we wanted our audience to do: Click through to the next page.

The result? While there was a clear decrease in overall engagements, there was a HUGE, immediate uptick in link clicks!

Feel free to experiment with the types of posts you make. It’s highly likely that you’re not going to nail it at first, so have some fun with it and try new, innovative ideas that could give you the results you’re looking for.

8. I Need to Join All the Social Media Networks

No, you only need to post on the platforms you feel would be most responsive to the product or service you are offering.

Identifying your audience is critical to the success of your brand, especially when it comes down to where you’re going to post. For example, if you have a millennial audience, you’re more likely to advertise and post on outlets like Snapchat and Instagram, as opposed to somewhere like Google + or LinkedIn.

A lot of brands, even the bigger ones, will try to advertise through new channels where the audience is unlikely to be receptive. It’s a waste of time, money and effort that could be invested in platforms where the audience is established and known

9. I’ll Just Ignore or Delete Negative Feedback

This goes back to the aforementioned point about not acknowledging comments left by disgruntled customers.

In case it needs further reiteration, though, allow me to remind you that neglecting and tuning out the concerns of your audience is poor business. But you didn’t need me to tell you that, right? You know that in the real world if you just ignore a customer’s complaints, it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.

Every comment should be addressed and every customer should feel valued. Deleting a post might make the post go away, but the anger and resentment from the commenter is still there. It’s unhealthy, and could spread to other customers that feel you would treat them in a similar way if they were not happy with your service or product.

10. I’m Not Going to Waste Time Looking at Stats

Then you’re going to have a bad time running your social media page.

Almost every social media outlet has an extensive platform for tracking metrics, far beyond the scope of surface engagements, such as likes, comments and shares. Those types of metrics only tell a story that your fans can see. What they can’t see are the stats that should be most important to you.

You know, stats like link clicks. As I mentioned before about the type of posts to use, your other metrics could be suffering if you’re focusing solely on one aspect that may have little to do with the success of your brand’s online influence.

Before you launch into posting or advertising, make sure to pinpoint the metric you think would generate what you’re most likely to gain, whether it be awareness, a product launch, engagement, or conversions.

A wealth of important metrics and stats are at your disposal. Use them! Social media is an investment that should be treated similarly to if you were going to run advertisements on the radio, on TV, or on a billboard.

We here at One Twelfth are heavy employers of metrics as indicators of success and they’ve yet to let us down. Get in touch with us today to learn how we can help you avoid these 10 pitfalls.